Today there is an explosion of information accessible through the Internet, bringing in more and more audience. If this communication medium was at first promising for advertisers to reach this increasing audience, it becomes harder and harder for today's advertising networks to efficiently target internet users.
One possible way to reach out to Internet users is through web banners (banner ads in short) that can be seen as a specific form of advertising on the World Wide Web. This form of online advertising consists in embedding an advertisement into a web page. It is intended to attract traffic to a website by linking the internet user to the website of the advertiser. The advertisement is constructed from an image (GIF, JPEG, PNG), JavaScript program or multimedia object employing technologies such as Silverlight, Java, Shockwave or Flash, often employing animation or sound to maximize presence. Images are usually in a high-aspect ratio shape (i.e. either wide and short, or tall and narrow), hence the reference to banners. These images are usually placed on web pages that have interesting content to users, such as e.g. a newspaper article, sports news, or an opinion piece.
A web banner is displayed when a web page that references the banner ad is loaded into a web browser. An illustration of a known system for displaying a web banner ad is shown in FIG. 1A. A communication device 100 (for instance a computer, laptop, smart phone and the likes) is equipped with a web browser to upload a webpage provided by a content provider 120, for instance located through use of the Internet at cnn.com, applestore.com . . . . The content provider 120 generally defines/allocates regions or spaces in its webpages that are reserved for the insertion of the banner ads. Banner ad inventories 111 are available from banner ads providers 110, also called ad servers or ad publishers. The content provider generally has agreements with a number of banner ad providers (BAP) for choosing what banner ads may be inserted in allocated regions (or spaces) of their webpages.
An illustration of a known method for pushing (i.e. inserting) a banner ad to the telecommunication device of a first party in an uploaded webpage is illustrated in FIG. 1B. A first party using the telecommunication device 100 may be for instance a user or subscriber to an internet service provider (ISP), shown through the ISP upper section in the FIG. 1A. This first party may have access to content providers 120 through the ISP, like for instance through an access node 105. The access node may also be referred to as an access point, or internet gateway. In a preliminary act 130, the first party requests content, namely a webpage, from a content provider 120 through the access node 105. This may be achieved through an http request (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) sent to the content provider 120 over the ISP network. The request which may transit over the internet if the content provider is outside the ISP network. The ISP network will also be referred to as the operator or carrier network as today ISP offers more services such as telephony, TV, content such as media and the like.
In a further act 140, the content provider and/or the BAP may choose/select a banner ad for insertion in the webpage through scripting instructions related to that ad. These scripting instructions, or plugin, are provided by the banner ad provider 110 to the content provider 120. The scripting instructions related to the selected banner ad are instructions in a scripting language, which, when executed for instance in a web browser application, will retrieve this selected ad from an ad inventory 111 of the banner ad provider 110.
These scripting instructions, also referred to as a plugin here after, may comprise generally:                a selected ad to be inserted in the allocated region of the webpage,        an address for the banner ad inventory 111, from which the selected banner ad can be retrieved, and,        the address or the name of the content provider, which selected the ad (e.g. for revenue purposes).        
In a further act 150, the first party uploads the webpage sent by the content provider 120 and received from the access node 105, which causes the browser application to execute the scripting instructions. As a consequence, using the information embedded in these instructions, one or more http requests are sent to the banner ad inventory 111 for fetching the banner ad chosen by the content provider and/or BAP. The banner ad inventory will reply to these http requests with the chosen banner ad which is subsequently loaded and displayed in the webpage (act 160) in the allocated region. One may note that these ads generally appear in the allocated regions with some latency, i.e. after the data linked to the content provider 120 itself are loaded. This is due to the fact that the webpage needs to be uploaded in the browser application to cause the execution of the scripting instructions.
When the first party clicks on the banner ad, he is directed to the website advertised in the banner ad as the banner ad generally comprises a re-direction link for redirecting the first party to the advertised website. The advertised website may then record a visit from the initial webpage of the content provider. The content provider may itself keep a record of the clicking on the banner ad. Each click on a banner ad and the subsequent redirecting will generate revenue for the content provider.
Through the agreement with banner ad providers 110 (BAP), the content provider 120 knows which ads are available. The banner ads are generally identified through a tag or identifier. These ad tags are parameters passed on to the scripting instructions and are subsequently in the http requests to the banner ad provider that can thus identity the chosen banner ad.
One problem today is that the banner ads are chosen randomly. When loading several times in a row an Internet accessible web page, such as available at yahoo.com or cnn.com for instance, the banner ads will keep on changing randomly with no apparent logic. After a number of uploads of the same page, the same ads will appear again, which gives at most an indication of the BAPS the content provider has an agreement with. No targeting of the chosen ad seems to come into play.
As a direct consequence, ISPs offering free access to the internet did not generate the revenues they could hope for from the advertisements. Indeed, the existing solutions offer banner ads of generally no interest to a user, as they are at best restricted to the content provider's choices. Any selection of a banner ad will only bring revenue to the content provider.
It would be interesting at this point if the banner ad could be chosen based on the ISP's interests to better target the needs of a user using its Internet services.
US2006085263 proposes a method and apparatus for targeting advertising content. A content provider generates ad banners. The content provider transmits an agent to a target computer. The agent obtains user information and transmits the user information to the content provider. A program running on the content provider organizes the user information and updates a user specific database wherein all targeted banner ads are stored for a subsequent push to the target computer.
In this proposed solution, an agent needs to be downloaded to the targeted computer. Furthermore, a pre-storing (in the user specific database) of targeted ads is needed, which will require a lot of data storage if the method is generalized to a lot of target computers.
Today there is still a need for a simple and straightforward method for providing targeted banner ads to users as chosen by an ISP. Additionally, in order to build a successful ecosystem around free Internet access, the ISP (or infrastructure providers) should get fairly compensated through significant revenues from the banner ads.